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Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Teaching

A few updates since last year... I am now teaching as an Assoc. Professor of Data Science in Lyon, France, at EM-Lyon Business School. The plan was 2 years and "we'll see." I finished year 1 of teaching business analytics, python and python data and text analysis. It was hard but rewarding when I had good students!

Talks / Slides

Since last year, lots of talks and slide decks! Creative first, then data sciency and visy.

Eyeo 2016: A talk on generative text, tools for creatives, and generally wonderful collaborations between humans and machines. Slides and code are here.

I also gave a similar but earlier form of this talk at Alt-AI, a small conference organized in NYC at SFPC a month earlier. Slides here.

Dato/Turi Data Science conference, June 2016. A tutorial talk on doing NLP-like things in Elasticsearch, with python and javascript code. The code examples are here.

JSM 2016: I was on a panel organized by Hilary Parker, where I gave a talk called "Cocktail Party Horror Stories: Data Vis for Clients." For various reasons, I don't want to make the slide deck public, sorry.

Lyon Datavis Meetup: "Design for Interactive Data Vis" - an updated version of a talk I gave in Miami at a local data vis conference, delivered in Lyon at the Datavis Meetup in November 2016.

Miami 2015 Seminar in Comm Dept.: A talk I gave while I was a Knight Fellow in Miami, "Text Analysis Without Programming." Should really be updated a bit since teaching business students, too.

I've started a tinyletter in a spirit similar to my Eyeo talk, "Things I Think Are Awesome." (archive) Keywords: AI, creative tech, data vis, generative text, games, occult... I'm also cross-posting them to Medium to reach a perhaps wider audience because there's virtually no feedback from a tinyletter!

Monday, July 18, 2016

I reprised my class on interactive visualization with D3.js at University of Miami with twice as many students in the spring semester. It was successful again, but I found it noticeably more work having more students. We did not focus on UNICEF this time; instead each student explored a topic of their own interest. More on how it scaled (or didn't) after some project highlights...

One note: Very few of them are reading their school email over the summer, so there wasn't much chance to update bugs or design issues I requested fixed. Fair warning :)

Iceland's Energy Use

The project by Zhiming "Eric" Sun is gorgeous and draws smart data comparisons about energy use over time by different countries. Iceland is the star here. There are nice tooltips with plots of use over time in this first display in the scrollytelling story.

In the next stage of the story, there is a slightly hidden lovely feature, which is that a mouseover on a bar zooms the map to locate the country in question. Useful!

There is a super interactive line chart with some smart commentary, and then a great connected scatter plot showing comparison country trajectories.

I think there are still some odd aspects of the scrollytelling display—as we constantly discovered in my class, getting the scrolly display/hide tuned right isn't that easy, at least the way we were constructing them.

Eric will be an amazing hire for someone when he's finished with his MFA. He was a superb help with other students' coding issues and has a strong sense of data story. His technical curiosity and ability to figure hard things out on his own were superior.

Chinese Tourism

Yuxuan "Sunny" Xie did a great project on Chinese tourists, specifically on where they go and what they spend. Her project features small multiples, scrollytelling, lines charts, bar charts, and a neat exploding map of China. The map is built with the d3-exploder, which she dedicated herself to trying to adapt and use.

The map of Chinese provinces shows tourism outbound, with mouseover and clickable provinces. Each provinces has a little story typifying a traveller from that area.

The scatterplot version of the map shows each province along 2 axes, population and income, using the same color scale for traveler percentages.

Sunny is a dedicated journalist with a strong sense of data design, visual design, and interaction. Another excellent hire!

In contrast, the locations with the most affordable houses are shown in pink here:

Jennifer has other stats on ridership by location and commuting preferences in her original project. She is another excellent MFA student in the Communications Department at U of Miami.

Climate Change

Shi Li, who was auditing my class, nevertheless did all the (hard) work and produced a lovely project on climate change. Her project features a number of striking charts, including a small multiples-details-on-demand array of bar charts based on modifying Jim Vallandingham's coffeescript demo. There is also an animated bump chart of the causes of global warming, with the dramatic lead going to greenhouse gases ever since 1990.

Cost of Education (2 Projects)

Sherman Hewitt, my only undergrad student this semester, did a great project on cost of college across time in the US. This bar chart from his data shows that as of 2012, there had been an increase in the number of folks attending college, in part fueled by an increase in the number of Hispanics attending.

His map shows that the most expensive states for public universities are Vermont and New Hampshire, with the cheapest being Colorado.

Sherman's project is strong in the reporting text as well. He has a great future and is working as a data journalism intern this summer.

Terrorism Over Time

One of her more interesting charts shows incidents by group by year, and the extreme and sudden increase in ISIL is the steepest, highest, and most recent of the blue lines. (The other highlights are Taliban, Al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram. The 1980ies are dominated by Shining Light and other Central/South-American groups.)

Formula One

Zhou Fang indulged her knowledge of Formula One racing stats to focus on the history of the Ferrari team.

In the map above, she shows the win history of Ferrari vs. other teams across 15 years of F1. When you click on a country in the map, small multiple line charts are displayed for each country by team, as well.

Travel Prices

Sevika Singh did a project on hotel costs in different cities. The differences between one-star and five-star prices in the same cities are particularly interesting. Here's a scatter plot showing the relationships, with some UI to help you find a city of interest. (I believe the dots are sized by average price, with New York having the largest average.)

Developer Survey

Jose Fierro looks at the responses to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Although he uses raw counts instead of percentages by country, the results are interesting, especially on the topic of future technology plans. The "big data" and hipster tools like Rust get lots of "intend to use in the future" votes, but tools like Javascript don't. Uh, good luck with that?

Other Projects...

Han Huang's autism project looks at the incidence of autism in the US by state. She uses donut charts, maps, a timeline, bar charts, and other techniques.

Former Students!

My fall semester students have done some great things since our D3 class. Barbara Poon got a job in the Emerging Technologist Program (ETP) at Nielsen. Halina Mader has been consulting as a web designer and D3 developer while she settles on her next job. Shiyan Jiang is a data journalism intern this summer with the Florida Sun Sentinel and so far has worked on a map for a story. Louise Whitaker is still an MFA student for another year and is an intern at Sapient this summer.

Three former students (Jiaxin Lui, Zhizhou Wang, Shi Li) worked together on a lovely multi-media article about shark tracking. They did it for Alberto Cairo's Maya class. They used D3, Maya, video, and nice web design. I helped them very little!

Debrief on Teaching This, Take 2.

Did I Help Too Much?
With twice as many students, I had twice as many visitors in my office wanting help making custom, and often very advanced, visualizations. I think I promised that they could do anything with my help; but my help and time were finite resources, and I never remembered that before it was too late! If I were teaching this again, I'd probably be a little more restrictive about the coding I did for them myself. It takes them—and me —longer if I prompt them to solve it themselves with a million hints. This just wasn't practical with the number of people needing help and the weekly deadlines. It's easier for everyone if they just watch me do it while sitting beside me as I talk through it. But I'm not sure that process teaches them enough and it still doesn't scale well. The alternative is for them all to have much less ambitious and interesting portfolio pieces, though. (Sadface.)

My former fall semester students who wrestled with their own problems achieved some excellent results on their own, as you can see above. One of them said as she did, "I'm finally starting to like and understand D3 now." So maybe they did learn even while watching me or reading my code fixes?

And Some Never Asked For Help
There were some students I never heard from and only realized were struggling when I saw their weekly homework or prodded them quite explicitly. The amount of help given was not even across the students, certainly. I put this issue down on my "teaching to-learns" list with some ambivalence about how to solve it. Some of the onus is on students to request the help, certainly...

Data Analysis
I saw a lot of data analysis and data manipulation issues this semester. The real work of data visualization is to get your data in shape, explore it, and then design your visualization and code it. Often the coding requires specific manipulation either before loading or in Javascript, to get the ideal structure from which to "draw." None of the steps can really be skipped. Our course program was definitely lacking in this "munging" and analysis training. Given the choice, I would not teach this class again without a preceding required data analysis class. (And even then, I've heard from other faculty friends that a data analysis course can easily go off-the-rails into endless custom work for the teacher if the students get to use their own data sets. This is a hard teaching problem.)

Javascript Difficulties
On the Javascript side, I assigned more work with Javascript programming and data "munging" than previously. I also spent a fair amount of time on Javascript refactoring and structuring of code, based on issues that had come up during the first semester, especially in the sizable final projects. I heard from some that these assignments were "too hard." A lot of students struggled with the basic programming I thought they knew in advance, e.g., what's a variable, what's a function, how to call functions, scope. Along with the required data analysis class, I would prefer this class is preceded by more solid Javascript preparation or some other programming experience. (Many students had had a prior class in JQuery or P5.js, but since those classes weren't about doing data manipulation, some of the higher level concepts didn't cross over.)

Bottom Line
Teaching this class to people without much programming experience is very hard, and doesn't scale to a large group of students. At least not without a lot of experienced TA support which I did not have. Doing it the same way again, I wouldn't be able to handle more than 15 students.

Updated Course Repo
The class materials, in some parts radically updated, are posted here. I especially added a lot to the maps section, including more Leaflet examples, and added some nice small multiples code examples. I'll probably update one more time soon to remove mention of student homeworks.

News: My New Teaching Job

Meanwhile, my next teaching gig is in Lyon, France, at EM-Lyon, where I will be teaching data analysis, data science, and NLP classes. I will be there for at least 2 years. I am looking forward to focusing now on the "front-end" of the analysis stage, teaching Excel, Tableau, SQL, Python, and R. Look for more insights on teaching those in the future!

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Here's the followup I promised on my post about teaching D3.js to journalism students: A selection from their projects! Their project goal was to produce a data story using UNICEF data (and possibly related data) about child mortality. The grading criteria were pretty rigorously spelled out as follows in Week 14 of the repo:

20% for using 4 chart types we covered in class (can include small multiples as one)

10% for good data analysis: Interesting findings/results, nice use of top 10s or top N, relating data sets to each other intelligently

5% for page layout/design: Good visual and functional CSS, useful external links, resume/CV link, header/footer with info about the project and data as needed.

I realized later I should have had a separate line item or aspect of "Good UX," which is embarrassing to me since that was my job for 18 years. Anyway, live and learn. Extra credit was given for using special layouts or interaction methods we didn't cover in class, as well as going above-and-beyond on any single aspect (such as using new external data).

Grading was NOT based on good code. It was primarily based on user-facing results. Expect the code to be not the best, as these were not computer science students and this wasn't a software engineering class! However, everyone is still learning and is interested in doing better, given opportunity to practice.

Also note: Several students were not native English speakers. Regardless of the injunction to check the English, there may be remaining writing issues. It's apparently hard to fit copy-editing into the project delivery cycle at the end of the semester :)

US Child Mortality

One of my favorites, this project by MFA student Louise Whitaker explores child mortality in the US as compared to the rest of the world. She starts with a "scrollytelling" line chart and moves into bar charts and small multiple bar charts with linked mouseovers and linked scatterplots:

There is a lovely tooltip on the map with dual dot plots in it:

And we end with more small multiple linked bar charts showing the relative status of different US states on health issues:

Louise will be looking for work in UX and/or data vis design after this semester. Amazing hire, I'd say.

Fertility and Mortality

Halina Mader's excellent project features a study of fertility and mortality rates for children under five. She uses a "stepper" structure with "next" and "previous" buttons.

Her first view is a world map colored by 2015 infant mortality rates. The tooltips are a lovely detail: a bullet-style bar graph showing the rate of the country vs. the world avg and the worst.

The next state is a little subtle if you aren't watching closely: the map animates shading over time with the decline in death rates. The line chart is synced with the map on rollover:

She shows useful trendlines and correlations on small multiple scatter plots which have linked mouseovers by country:

Earlier, in only Week 6 of my class, Halina also produced this wonderful line chart block that was widely fav'd on Twitter:

Malawi and Under Five Mortality

Graduating senior Barbara Poon produced a lovely project with helpful graphics and a nice analytic edge. Her scrollytelling trends story is particularly good:

She also uses dotplots, one of my favorite plot types:

Barbara is looking for analytics and data visualization work and would be another excellent hire!

The Effect of War

Grad student Shiyan ("Yan") Jiang's project focused on the effect of war on child mortality. She opens with a choropleth map with line chart tooltips (ok, if you see a trend, I maybe have told them all they'd get instant A's for tooltips with charts in them):

She uses a scrollytelling style to walk through her data story. At one point she highlights key sections of trend lines to show long-term impacts of wars:

Yan is a graduate student who is available for summer work and contract work.

Disasters and Mortality

Jiaxin Liu's project uses a unique button legend method for controlling the views. This line chart's focus on worldwide disasters and their impact on child deathrates was especially good:

She also features some synchronized interaction between plots -- highlighting world regions on the line chart also highlights the same countries in the scatterplot on the right:

Jiaxin became such a big fan of D3 during the class that she used it for another web class project as well. Jiaxin will be looking for data journalism jobs after this semester!

Female Education

Zhizhou ("Jo") Wang produced a very graphic, dramatic visual project related to female education and childhood mortality. Her magnum opus interactive piece is the linked map, line charts, and bar charts. Clicking on the map updates all of the data on the right:

Monday, January 11, 2016

I spent last semester frantically putting together a course on D3.js for journalism students at the University of Miami at the same time as teaching it and grading it. Wow, teaching a semester course is hard. Teaching coding, especially to non-CS students, is a special challenge. I was lucky to have a small class of very patient and motivated guinea pigs students for the first semester.

The class was meant to be a portfolio-builder, focused on journalistic interactive visualization. We used data from UNICEF in the first semester, visible in the examples and projects. This coming semester has fewer journalism students, which means changing the content a little, a process I'm still going through in the repo. This post is a recap of what we did and what was hard about it. Next post (in a week) will show some of my students' work.

Interactivity and "Journalistic" Vis

Why teach D3? At least one friend teaching journalism students said he'd never do that again. I heard this right before I started on the adventure. But this course was meant to be on interactive data visualization, which means a chart does more than behave like a static bar chart and readers do more than look at the bars. I have talk slides here about designing for interactivity in vis, and primarily the examples I show are built in D3. This is the current lay of the land!

There is still no better library than D3 for building custom data-driven designs, with custom interactions, and integrating them with the web page DOM. I did show Highcharts, and one of the first homeworks was to use it for a few charts. But the animated transitions in D3 (and open palette of design options) are what sell it, and all my students wanted to do fancy artistic animations in their final projects: animated maps, animated lines, animated lines on maps, synchronized lines and maps that animate over time, you name it if it involved lines or maps apparently. :) (It pushed me hard too, to help them figure all that out.)

When I was trying to learn D3, I wanted to know how to hook up a chart to UI elements and make things move, but the books out there didn't get into anything that fancy, sticking mostly to how to create static charts in isolation. Static charts are usually much easier to create with other tools than D3 (unless it's an "unusual" chart type). So for my class I focused a lot on the UI interaction aspects of D3 coding. D3 can do a lot of fancy things, like networks, parallel coordinates, sankey diagrams... But I stuck to the "basics" for journalistic vis in this class:

Tables and heatmaps

Bars, vertical and horizontal

Lines, including handling lots and lots of lines

Stream/Area charts

Stacked and grouped bars

Scatterplots

Small multiples

Maps

We also covered a lot of key interaction features like animated transitions, swapping out a dataset and animating in a new one, how to hook up various UI elements like select menus, buttons, sliders; making complex tooltips, linking two charts together with a toggle switch or a click/mouseover, annotating particular data points, adding legends. In Javascript, important data concepts included sorting, getting top 10's (or N's), creating calculated variables.

Setting up the Tools: Github and Servers, Oh My

Getting folks set up on day one with a server and Github was a challenge, but luckily most of them had encountered a little bit of git before. However, most students did not know how to use the command line, and two of them had Windows machines, so this was "challenging" for all including me. (I totally forgot that all people don't automatically know Unix and Windows command line. Really threw me for a loop.) I probably oversold how useful "git stash" is when they had conflicts, but I feel no regret. Before too long they were git pulling every week and had learned how to make gists.

Gists are the building blocks of a portfolio of bl.ocks, a key component of the D3 community eco-system. Also, they were required for easier grading and debugging on my part — especially now that Ian Johnson (@enjalot) has released blockbuilder.org, which made debugging a lot simpler.

For some reason, using a server really stumps new web programmers. (After watching people struggle, I've put a bunch of documentation on setting them up in the nascent drafty d3-faq.) Folks who have done only static web design have usually not got a good understanding of why you need to use a server to view and render code. Unlearning that they can just double click on their file to view it takes a lot of time. No, the URL really has to say "localhost://" not "file://". The source of many bugs for the first few weeks was folks not having loaded their page using the server, even after they had set one up. (And note: That's an example of an issue that's harder to debug by email remotely than it is when you're looking over their shoulder. There were a lot like this. My office hours were sometimes busy.)

Javascript with D3

My class came in with required background in HTML and CSS, but little to no Javascript. Heck, this is how a lot of people learn D3, so why not? Well, anyone (like me) who has gone this route knows that the Javascript part is the thing that trips you up the most, even after you start to "get" the D3 paradigm. Just understanding the D3 examples out there (especially Mike Bostock's) requires a fairly advanced understanding of Javascript.

For all data visualization, data "munging" is hard and sometimes very data-set specific. You can either "munge" in a tool outside Javascript — I recommended and showed Excel — but at a certain point, you need to get a grip on the munging that's close to the vis code itself. Structuring your data to make it easy to get at certain values during interaction in the UI is pretty important. Getting data sets merged, looping through them to do calculations, or to create subsets of data, learning and using a functional coding style with forEach and maps — these things were hard for everyone, even the students with some programming background. I gave a few pure Javascript homeworks, on topics like debugging and data manipulations, but honestly, I should have given more of them. (OTOH, this is harder to grade, because it usually requires eyes-on-careful-review of each one. Meh.)

I also should have buckled down on teaching data manipulation tools earlier. In an attempt to be "easier" on them, I didn't teach d3.nest() right away, and helped one poor student (hi Luis!) write a laborious loop in JS to nest his data... After that hour, I realized, "Teach all the tools. Teach the nest()." Students need to know about the helper functions, which will save them time down the road. A homework on nesting data followed. I'll introduce lodash.js this spring semester, too.

A Lack of "Complex" Examples To Teach From

Many of the D3 examples, books, and tutorials are basic or even "toy" (abstract from realistic frames, not using real data, etc). There's a role for the basic — the best intro book is Scott Murray's very simple, unscary starter book, Interactive Data Vis for the Web. We started there, of course, but as we got into complex animations and transitions, there were fewer and fewer good working examples and tutorials out there to inspire class materials.

The big exceptions are the tutorials of Jim Vallandingham and Nathan Yau on Flowing Data; both do "journalistic" vis how-to's on their sites. I borrowed and adapted several of theirs, for small multiples and maps in particular. Jim's code tends towards more "advanced" and I simplified some of it — which I have mixed feelings about and may undo; Nathan's code I sometimes updated when it was using older D3 style or could be made more functional. Scott Murray's intro examples I also updated to use more D3-common conventions (e.g., adding the margin object convention, removing for-loops).

Even after seeing how to use functions for update patterns in D3, when project time came, everyone struggled to organize their code. When I asked people to just make a page combining 3 charts on it, all hell broke loose in the global scope conflict space. While I was quite clear that projects were judged on end-user experience, not code quality, code structure issues made it much harder for the students to modify and debug their own code. I'll be focusing more on code structure this semester.

Unfortunately, there are more examples online of how to use Angular or React to structure big projects, rather than pure Javascript. Obviously those frameworks solve a lot of organizational and architectural issues, but this is a challenge for everyone teaching D3, I feel. I don't want to inflict a framework on students who are just learning Javascript and D3.

Finding a Data Story Is Hard

Almost all of the class had had a static infographics class (from Alberto Cairo), but the practice of finding a story in data is hard, and I considered it outside the scope of the course. I recommended and demoed Excel and Tableau to a few students who were struggling, and luckily several had already had experience using Tableau. (I tried PowerBI briefly and was also very impressed by it!) Nevertheless, data "stories" for their projects were in flux until the very end. It's notoriously difficult to "design" for data vis without using the real data (sketching by hand only gets you so far), and a lack of proficiency with exploratory tools probably impaired some of them.

With a class next semester that's less journalistic, I'll expand the project grading to allow for less data-driven stories and allow a broader range of data visualization. I'll also be exploring a design process that starts with data exploration, then moves to UI sketches, then moves to phased development and feedback cycles.

Debugging is Also Hard

I knew I should teach debugging, and I did, but I think you can only teach it to a point. It's boring to watch someone else doing it, but it's also necessary. Getting students to learn how to use breakpoints in the Chrome console is a necessary evil, as is walking back through the stack trace.

One of the harder aspects of debugging is that you have to have a lot of experience with what can go wrong to be able to guess what it might be this time. It's about hours spent doing it. This is hard to teach; it just requires practice time.

Students Will Find and Replicate All Your Bugs

Because the general practice of learning D3 in the wild is to take examples and modify them to fit your own data, I wanted to support that in my class. I made examples and then had the class plug in their own data (hopefully on the topic of their final project!). This means that code sloppiness, errors, and bad habits in my code ended up replicated and magnified over and over. Including bad UI design — one example with unfortunate bar coloring showed up in a couple of projects.

My homework is to fix all that in the repo and try not to introduce too many new ones.

Thanks for Content I Borrowed, Linked To, or Adapted

Course Materials

The repo (that will keep evolving this semester) is here. I expect to be adding more examples — such as for canvas, crossfilter/dc.js, and perhaps other layouts. There might even be data "art." I will post links and examples from student projects for the fall in another week or so!

Sunday, September 13, 2015

I am installed in Miami for the academic year as a Visiting Knight Chair in the Journalism department; I've been busy (frantically, insanely busy) trying to put together class materials for the semester, grade stuff, produce talks and workshops, and keep up with Twitter.

As a nice benefit — or responsibility — I have project money to spend on activities or products that will improve the lives of the journalists of the future. Or of the now, if I do it right. Apart from some conference organization with Alberto Cairo, I'm thinking hard about how I'd like to spend that money. Here are a few things I tweeted about a week ago that I think would be of great benefit to data journalists, which don't yet exist fully:

"A few of my Wish List items for improving work, probably out of my project $ and scope:"

And apparently there's more goodness in the works addressing my needs for IPython notebook interactive widgets in a sub-vega project on Github, pointed out by Rob Story), called ipython-vega right now. Also on the Python front, Rob Story suggests we might want to look atPyxley from Stitchfix, but to me that still currently looks like a lot of programming and manual setup for a non-programmery analyst. Shiny apps are dead-simple for data analysts with a little gumption to throw up and share with folks right from their R Studio environment.

The future looks great about 5+ years out when all the grad students have finished and productized (or gotten significant coding support). But right now there is still a lot of pain, especially when you're trying to teach folks and recommend tools that are stable, documented, and tested (by people, not unit tests, although those too). Trifacta, of course, is not open-source. A competitor product, Alteryx, looks nice and has an academic license scheme but the non-academic version is $4K! Both for students and data journalists, enterprise level pricing for data wrangling tools is looking scary.

Aside on Entity Recognizers

Oh, a little note on the #6 item, entity recognition tools... Anyone who is trying to do named entity recognition (NER) in text files has a horrible slog getting good results. NER means things like looking up all the people, places, products, or companies in a text. It's hard because different strings are used to refer to the same things. To get results that are any good, especially on dynamic recent data (like news!), you need to train a recognizer with labeled text. (This is because the "out of the box" models and tools like Stanford NER etc. are almost always inadequate for what you really want.) The tools to do the labeling, and the labeling itself, pretty much suck. (Although I admit I haven't looked at the most recent one recommended to me by the Caerus folks.) I know a lot of grad students are suffering with this, when doing research on text in highly specific domains.

I'd love to see a marketplace for trained models customized for different domains, and easy-peasy tools for updating them and sharing improvements. I wish someone's NLP student would tackle this as a startup. Or, I suppose, I could do it with my project money and some help.

Instead, Text Analysis and Vis How-To's?

In the realm of things I can deliver that don't require a corporate team of developers, I'm thinking about doing an online repo ("book") of text analysis and visualization methods. This will be a combination of NLP and corpus analysis methods (in R and Python, I hope) as well as a handbook of visualization methods for text (with sample D3 code). The audience would be journalists with text to analyze, digital humanists with corpora, linguists wanting to get more visual with their work. Because my time is shockingly limited, I'll probably recruit an external helper with my project money to create code samples. If you've seen my epic collection of text vis on Pinterest and want to know "how do I make those?" I hope I'll be able to help you all.

How does this sound? Useful?

Any other ideas from folks out there? I'm chatting with my pals at Bocoup (Irene, Jim, Yannick) about other options for collaborations between us.

Local Workshops on Data Journalism Topics

One of my contributions to the local community at U of Miami is a series of workshops on topics hopefully of interest to data journalists (that I am qualified to teach). The first was a well-attended one on Excel Data Analysis (files here), and upcoming topics include:

Excel Charts and Graphs

Just What is Big Data (and Data Science) Anyway?

Intro to Web Analytics: A/B Testing and Tracking

Intro to Tableau

Python and R: What Are They Good For?

Text Mining with Very Little Programming

Visualizing Network Data

I'd like to do one on command line data analysis, and some more on Python and R tools, but am not sure yet where the group wants to go. Stay tuned for more links!

Sunday, March 08, 2015

Overdue for a blog post, and I guess my news needs an official announcement!

I'm happy to announce that I have accepted a visiting post at the University of Miami for 9 months, beginning August 2015 and running through the academic year. This post is financially possible thanks to the generous Knight Foundation, which supports various faculty positions in journalism throughout the country. I’ll be helping Alberto Cairo get his new Data Visualization and Journalism track in the Interactive Media MFA off to a running start; I’ll be teaching data visualization and data analysis, including D3.js. I'll probably keep some side contract work going at the same time. Here's my favorite version of the news on Twitter:

I’ve always been wary of trying to teach D3 in any short workshop format — I’ve been asked and said “no” many times. However, the first class I’ll teach is a semester long, so it seems more feasible. To help prepare for this, I’ll also be a TA in this spring’s online Data Visualization and Infographics with D3 course co-taught by Alberto and Scott Murray (@alignedleft, screen-capped above), who is the author of a very nice introductory D3 book, Interactive Data Visualization for the Web. (If you’re reading about it now for the first time, the class filled up quickly to the cap set at 500 people. Maybe they can do it again if it’s successful.)

In other more minor teaching news, I did a guest lecture at CMU in Golan Levin’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on NLP (natural language processing) in Python; the files are all here. The most “interesting” part from Twitter’s perspective is the Bayesian detection of sex scenes in 50 Shades of Gray (because spam is boring). I first did this cocktail-party stunt at OpenVis Conf in 2013, and now I’ve finally released the data and code for it. These introductory lectures cover concepts that would be useful in any more advanced text visualization context; I hope to get a chance to expand on that subject while in Miami, too.

I’m also putting together a lynda.com class, Introduction to Data Analysis with Pandas, although I’ve been doing it veeerrrryyyy slowwwwlllyyyy.

Finally, related to teaching, I’m co-chair of OpenVis Conf this year. We are not quite sold out yet (as of this post), and I think you should come. This is a conference about how the visualization sausage is made — lots of educational talks!

I had planned to write 3 more sections on learning, teaching, and making, but there were some minefields in there about gender and sexism in tech. Not ready for prime time. No navel-gazing for now!

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

This little text-to-image replacement toy made me laugh, so I decided to put it up in case it makes you laugh too. In my last project, I did part-of-speech tagging in Python and used that to replace nouns with other nouns (see post and demo); in this one, I did the part-of-speech tagging all in Javascript using the terrific RiTa.js library!

With RiTa, you get the same slightly noisy results I got in the pattern.py tagging I did before: not all the nouns are good "nouns." The API for tagging is super easy:

After generating the parts of speech, I filtered for just the nouns ("/nn" and "/nns"). I replaced those with words in "span" tags, and then used an ajax call to search for each spanned text in Google's image search API. The whole operation is outlined here, with the logic for getting the local text selected first: